Oh No, Not Again
by Quirel
Summary: The Master Chief has fought thousands of enemies, seen hundreds of worlds. He has encountered the great mysteries of the Galaxy, and he has defeated them all. What he could never figure out is why some Grunts scream 'Not again' shortly before death.


_**Location Unspecified, Internal Timeclock Error #RG(()_  
**_

The Master Chief slowly came to, floating through white clouds of mist, from the mystical realm of dreams. He felt the world solidifying, taking form again.

Slowly, he realized that he was at home, the only home he'd known since training on Reach. The MJOLNIR armor that encased his body like a cocoon. The familiar feeling of the gel layers pressed against his bare skin, the armor plates that bore down upon his frame, the humming circuitry. He had merged with the armor to a degree, had come to know its limitations and ailments like his own body. The armor was fine, undamaged.

And yet, something was terribly wrong, wasn't it?

As his visor polarized to suit the low level conditions, he saw what troubled him. He was supposed to be on the Forerunner Dreadnought, aboard Truth's ship.

But instead of the clean Forerunner angles and muted grays, he saw dark cinderblock walls covered in rust stains and, of all things, a tattered canvas. Stalactites of niter hung down from the ceiling, and briny water cascaded down the brick walls. Great bloated rats with pale skin scurried through the pools of standing water, and one of them fixed its feral red eyes upon the Master Chief.

This wasn't too worrisome. The Master Chief, John, as he was known to a few, had been in even worse places before. However, in those places, he hadn't been chained.

John rotated his head to look at what was restraining him. It was a huge iron shackle, bolted to the wall. More shackles held his arms and legs, securing him in the cruciform position.

A moment's experimentation revealed that, despite their rusty condition, they held him with an unyielding grip.

Well, if this was what the Chief thought it was, at least he would finally get that 'Prisoner of War' decoration.

* * *

Perhaps it was the sound that alerted him to the intruder. Besides the dripping of water, the pattering of rats' feet over broken glass, there was something else. The hissing of dry breath through clenched teeth.

"Remember me?" the voice said, the rough bark of a fox as it pursues a panicked rabbit.

A Marine was crouched in the far corner of the room, shrouded in the harsh light with streams of water pouring down over his head. He was massaging his temples with clenched fingers, trying to calm his feverish mind in the cool water.

His hands stopped and his eyes snapped open, two small actions that demanded a scare chord to accompany them. With deliberate slowness, the Marine turned to face the Chief, glaring at him with all the power of a pair of klieg lights.

The Master Chief was struck by the look as if it was a physical assault. Colonel Ackerson had done his very best to shut down the Spartan Project. OSDTs and Innies hated him for what he was. Countless Brutes had tried to kill him. Hell, one of those disgusting apes had even tried to strangle him.

Nothing he had ever encountered even came close to preparing him for the pure, distilled hatred pouring from the Marine's piercing gray eyes.

The Marine himself wasn't a pretty sight. His hair was shaved in a slightly untidy crew cut that somehow managed to appear greasy. His face had a patchwork of fine white scars and bruises, covered with dirt and grime. The fatigues were stained with blood, sweat, dirt, and urine.

This Marine had clearly been through Hell, was clearly at home in this dank cellar. The Master Chief, however, did not see how this connected with his imprisonment.

The Marine spoke, his dry lips parting to let out the raspy words.

"You son of a bitch."

The Master Chief was startled. The Marine's voice was harsh, gravely, more of a hiss than anything else. Not. Human.

The Marine approached him, walking slowly, as a predator might stalk his prey. His hands were clenched hard, blood running down the fingers from where his fingernails were digging into the flesh. Soon, they were face to face, with the Marine's rancid breath fogging up the Chief's visor.

"You don't even know who I am, do you?" asked the Marine, his words hissing through his teeth as they clicked together.

The Master Chief studied the Marine for a second, before shaking his head. If he'd ever met this Marine, he'd probably remember it.

The Marine grinned, a smile full of cynicism and skepticism that showed his pale gums and yellow teeth. Then he punched the Master Chief upside the head, the cracking of knuckles audible.

"_Liar_!" he shouted, a dozen expressions competing for dominance of his face. A sudden, violent reaction, emphasized by dilated pupils and uneven breathing. Clearly, this Marine was not in his right mind, not rational.

"Must have been funny as Hell, killing me over and over again. And I wouldn't remember a thing, would I? You knew I wouldn't remember! _Well I sure as Hell remember now! I remember EVERYTHING!"_ the Marine screamed, spraying spit all over the Chief's visor.

The Chief tried to work his brain around what the Marine had said. It didn't make much sense.

"What the Hell do you have against me? What the _Hell _did I ever do to you?" the Marine gasped, his rage ebbing. That was worrisome. Someone angry could be goaded into doing something stupid, someone calm could be reasoned with, but someone unstable was like rolling dice.

"Um… besides taking me captive and chaining me in some cellar?" Humor seemed to be the best way to go at this point in time. The Chief didn't know what else to do.

The Marine considered this for a moment and seemed to realize that he wasn't getting anywhere. Then he grinned, a gruesome sight. The corners of his mouth were bloody, as if he'd been chewing them.

A surprising change had come over him; he turned and walked away with a bounce in his step. It almost seemed like he was enjoying himself, didn't have a care in the world.

"Ya know, when I think about it, I suppose reincarnation could actually be fun." the Marine said conversationally, his previous rage forgotten. "If things don't work out, ya just put the gun to yer head and pull the trigger. BOOM! You are free to do whatever the Hell you want, and then start all over again. Clean slate."

The Marine whirled around, glaring at the Chief.

"Except," he hissed. "It's not like that! You don't realize that it's happening. You just start all over again, completely clueless. Which can be _humiliating, _especially when someone is carrying out some sort of sadistic vendetta against your own immortal soul!"

Again, he stalked toward the Chief, his tattered boots splashing through the stagnant water.

"As far as I can remember," he said, launching into a monologue. "You started back on Reach. I was a dog back then. I know, it's not the most prestigious of forms, but a lot better than some of the alternatives. Trust me on that one."

The Marine took out a pair of dog-tags, eying them and enjoying the irony. "I'm in a K-9 unit that gets loaned out to a platoon of Marine rednecks, and they use me to hunt down a pack of kids that have been giving them trouble. After a few days, the kids poisoned us so we would shut up and they could break into the middle of the encampment and ring some silly bell."

The Master Chief remembered that, back in his early training. He wondered how this Marine had found out about it. Maybe he had been a part of the platoon? But he looked too young to have been around…

The dog tags were shoved back into a pocket, and the Marine pointed at the Chief, venom imbued in his every gesture. "Throwing meat to the K-9s would have worked just as well. Hell, we would have loved you for it. But no, you just had to leave dead squirrels out where you knew we'd find them. Dead squirrels smeared with unripe berries and anti-bacterial ointment."

The Marine leaned in close, face to visor with the Master Chief, his gray eyes burning with humiliation.

"Do you have any idea... how _painful..._ death-by-diarrhea is?" he asked.

The Master Chief shook his head.

"_IT'S PRETTY FRICKIN' AGONIZING!"_

"Here's the next highlight of my tragicomic life: I'm human, working against the imperialist government of the United Nations. Not as a specialist, not as an insurgent; I was working as a non-combatant. A dockworker in an asteroid habitat, to be precise."

The sound of grinding teeth was audible.

"I see some shadows moving where they shouldn't, and I pull out my chatter to call my supervisor. No sooner than I dial the number when the Pelican I was working on takes off and crashes through the vacuum barrier. We all get sucked out into space and die."

That had been the Chief's first mission, back on Eridanus Secundus. He'd always harbored doubts about what his team did when they escaped, if they should have done it differently…

But this wasn't the time for reflection. He should be concentrating on how to get out of his restraints and get the Big Four out of the Marine: Name, Rank, Serial Number, and Unit. That would be followed by the equally important topics: 'Where the Hell are we?' and 'how the Hell do you know so much about the Spartan II project?'

"Right," the Marine rasped. "Let's skip ahead to the events on the Sacred Ring."

The Master Chief listened intently. Halo was hardly a military secret, but it would be interesting to hear what the Marine knew.

"At about this point in my life of reincarnation, I was at a low point: I was a Grunt," the Marine continued with his monologue. It was amazing how much disgust and revulsion he could pack into the word 'Grunt'.

"Not only that, but I was in deep _kaka _with my bosses. So here I am, hiding in a side room on a downed Covenant Cruiser, minding my own business, when this huge juggernaut twice my size sporting green and black armor walks into the room."

The Master Chief knew who he was talking about.

"Before I can even turn around to run away properly, YOU throw a plasma grenade and stick me right between the eyes!"

The Master Chief could see this happening. Unfortunately, he'd done that way too many times to remember the specific time that the Marine was talking about.

"The next highlight, though not the next incarnation, was on Earth, during the Covenant Invasion. I was a Marine fighting door-to-door alongside you. You take my shotgun and hand me your BR. 'Oh sure Chief!' I say. In the next room, I'm in face to face with an Elite."

The Marine held up three fingers. Two looked like they had been broken at some point in time, and the third was missing a tip.

"Three bullets. Three bullets, and that's all that you left me in that magazine. That _xeno_ was laughing at me while it beat me to death!"

The Master Chief shook his head.

"Now here's the kicker: I'm a Grunt _again_ on Delta Halo, and we get ambushed by a Goliath in green armor. You kill the two other Grunts, and then you kill _me_ with a plasma grenade."

The Marine stopped pacing and glared at the Chief.

"Definition of overkill aside, remember me now?"

Another Grunt that the Master Chief had killed with a Plasma Grenade?

"You're going to have to be more specific than that." The Chief said.

The Marine spoke slowly, enunciating each word clearly. "I'm the one who screamed '_Oh no, not again_!'"

Ah, _that_ particular Grunt.

"Oh, yeah…" the Marine drawled, mimicking the Chief. "Getting killed the same way twice by the same green giant. Bit of a bloody giveaway, eh? Bit of a frackin' pointer."

"Right. It was at that point that everything finally clicked and ran. Before that, it was all slowly coming together, slowly being brought to a boil. How could I help it, when the same person keeps killing me! Again and again and _again_! 'That's funny,' I'd say as I walked back to Purgatory. 'That bugger who ran me over in the Warthog looked rather familiar.'"

This was crazy. No, the Marine was crazy. The situation was far beyond crazy. The Master Chief had been taken captive by an insane Marine who, despite the considerable evidence that he was still alive, thought that the Chief had killed him before.

On the other hand, the Marine did know a disturbing amount about the Master Chief. And the Spartan II project. And Halo.

The Marine cut the Master Chief's train of though short by continuing on his monologue.

"'That's it!' I screamed when I was burning in Purgatory. 'I'll never go back!' And I meant it too. Hell, I was even halfway through filling out the papers to be transferred to the Korprulu sector when I get yanked back into this universe!"

"I don't know how you did it. I don't know how it happened, I-I-I don't _care_ how you did it. You must have figured that I didn't suffer enough humiliation the last time around, so there I was. Back in High Charity, bloated, nauseous and itchy. I didn't have time to figure out what the hell was going on, because you... were standing right there... with a shotgun. Naturally."

By now, the Marine had swung from a depressing low to a manic high, the gestures and the motions returning. The Marine practically leaped across the room, striding up to the canvas that draped the opposite wall.

"For as long as I remember, you, Master Chief Petty Officer John One-One-Seven, YOU have made my lives hell! YOU have been playing some sort of malicious game of life and death, robbing me of my peace and sanity! But here, within this refuge, I have documented every single crime you have committed against me! Evidence such that the Universe may witness my trails!"

With that, the Marine ripped the canvas down to reveal a mural, beautifully detailed and painstakingly painted, where outright dedication had overcome a critical lack of skill and let the Marine catalog all the abuses that a cruel world and one oblivious cyborg could deliver. It was a montage of the Chief throughout his career. In minute detail born from days of concentration, he was pushing a huge boulder onto a Hunter, back on Sigma Octanus IV. In garish colors that brought bile to one's mouth, he was impaling an Elite upon its own sword, during the Paris IV campaign. And down there, in a clash of unflattering hues… he wasn't quite sure what he was doing in the lower-left corner, but it looked weird.

"Behold, the record of your transgressions! I was the bystander you shot in the URF shootout on Bricadia!" The Marine pointed at a motif of a civilian cowering under a table… in an unfortunate pose resembling that of someone pulling out a handgun. "And you killed me when I was a guard in Base New Hope! Snapped my neck without warning!" Another picture depicted a corpse with its head at a strange angle and the Master Chief entering a door behind the corpse.

"And, finally, the most degrading, humiliating, and absolutely painful way you've killed me, or anything else unfortunate enough to meet you! Remember that time on Stavromula Beta, when the Grunts ambushed you with needlers and you used a Marine's corpse to shield yourself?"

The Master Chief did remember that. Not his proudest moment, but the MJOLNIR Mark IV he'd been wearing at the time didn't have shields, and the Master Chief had to choose between getting ripped apart and…

"I wasn't _dead _yet, arsehole!"

Ah. That would have hurt. With a start, the Master Chief realized what he was doing in the lower left-hand corner of the Mural: Holding a Marine's corpse over his own body, with the Marine taking all the needles.

"Master Chief, in all the time I've had to know you, I've found you to be heartless, cruel, cunning, and incomprehensibly tactless. I don't know what the hell I did to offend you in the first place, but it ends here and now. Y'see, Chief, if you'd only killed me once or twice, I would have made this quick and painless. But because you've _really_ pissed me off, I'm going to kill you nice… and slow…"

The Marine reached into his soiled jacket, exposing a large array of knives and implements typically seen only in torture pornos, before pulling out an M6D. Aiming the gun at the Chief's head, he slowly advanced.

"That's right you arsehole. You and I, we're going to have one _Hell_ of a time! And first," the Marine's voice dropped low, dripping with anticipation. "We're going to see what you look like beneath that helmet."

The Master Chief saw the Marine aim the gun at his head with one hand, and reach over with the other. He felt panic welling up in his heart as he heard broken fingernails scratch at the side of his helmet. If he was going to escape, he'd have to act now.

With a surge of strength born from desperation, the Master Chief ripped his left arm free of the restraint. Time seemed to slow down and speed up at the same time. Spartan Time.

Within a few milliseconds of freeing his left arm, the Chief reached over and grabbed the Marine's gun arm below the wrist, forcing the Marine to aim the gun at the ceiling. Unfortunately, the Master Chief panicked and squeezed too hard. The bones in the Marine's arm shattered, and the upper part of the forearm was forced back until the gun was aimed at the Marine's forehead, right between his steel-gray eyes.

Just a few milliseconds after the bones in his arm were pulverized, the muscles contracted, tightening the Marine's grip on his handgun and pulling the trigger.

* * *

For the next few moments, the Master Chief just stared at the Marine's lifeless body, his mind too shocked for full comprehension of what had just happened.

It had all happened too fast; the gun firing, a sharp report resounding throughout the room, the slide jumping back and ejecting a spent casing. That's all it had taken to end the Marine's short, tormented life.

The Chief couldn't tear his eyes away from the bulging eyes, wide from shock; or the mouth that was frozen in a snarl; or the beginning of a scream of pain and surprise that was never finished. He watched as blood slowly trickled down from the head wound, staining the Marine's eyes red.

As a pool of blood began to spread across the floor beneath the corpse, panic flooded the Chief's mind. With panic came desperation, and he quickly tore himself free of his restraints, ripping the cast iron right out of the wall.

As the world dissolved into the fish-eye lens of unbridled fear, John raced away, as fast as he had ever run, trying to put as much distance between him and that corpse…

* * *

**Forerunner Dreadnought, 0153 Hours**

With a jerk, the Master Chief awoke.

He was still here, still on Truth's ship. He hadn't gone anywhere since he hid away for a very light rest…

It had all been a dream, a… nightmare?

It was a pretty weird nightmare, but that wasn't surprising, given what he'd been doing over the past year. Mucking about on giant doomsday devices, fighting a nightmarish plague from Hell, and beating back the Covenant. After all that, weird dreams were something to be expected… right?

The ship around him shuddered slightly, almost unnoticeably. The ship was dropping out of Slipspace, arriving at Earth.

The Master Chief pushed the nightmare from his mind. He had things to do.

* * *

**Tsavo Highway, Traxus Industries Warehouse, 1028 Hours**

The Drone maintained a steady rate of fire from its plasma pistol, but it was quickly tiring. It did a midair backflip and landed on a nearby wall, resting before moving on to a safer place.

As it latched on to the concrete wall, a lance of gunfire shot out from behind the crates it had been firing upon. The AP rounds tore into its body, shattering exoskeleton and shredding internal organs. If that didn't kill it, then the fifteen meter fall to the ground would.

The Master Chief crouched down. That was one Drone dead, but there were more flying around outside the warehouse he was in, and they were starting to enter through the holes in the roof.

He was certainly able to deal with them, but he was down to his last clip, the clip was mostly empty, and his weapon wasn't the best one for the job at hand.

Without a word, he reached over to a female Marine beside him and swapped her BR for his Assault Rifle. He checked the clip, and then studied the ceiling for any sign of the Drones.

After a few seconds, he realized that something was wrong. The Marine hadn't acknowledged him, hadn't said or done anything after he exchanged their weapons. Warily, he turned around to face her.

She was slowly turning the gun around in her hands, examining it. Then she looked up and faced the Master Chief, her piercing gray eyes clouded with confusion.

"Have we met before?" she asked.

The Chief's blood ran cold, his heart stopped for a split second. For the second time that day, his vitals flashed KIA. Then, faster than he'd ever moved before, he grabbed the assault rifle back and pushed the BR-55 into her hands.

"No!" he said forcefully. "We haven't."

Nightmare or not, the Chief wasn't taking any chances.

* * *

**A/N: Hmm... I uploaded this last night without the customary Authors Notes. Bugger.**

**First order of business is to thank Imsi and Ninja Theory for proofreading this. Wasn't quite as funny before, but they helped me polish it up.**

**Second, I am still working on Isolation, and hope to get the next chapter up by the end of the month. I should have posted it at the beginning of May, but AP tests and the SAT conspired to make me late.**

**Thank you, have a nice day.**


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